I have an old OS ubuntu 16.04, where I plan to install RabbitMQ 3.9.

Before installing RMQ you should have Erlang installed first. RMQ 3.9 requires the latest version of Erlang 24.

I followed this guide on packagecloud:

https://packagecloud.io/rabbitmq/erlang/install

It doesn’t work since packagecloud has lost the release source for ubuntu 16.04.

So I google and found this URL:

How to Install Erlang on Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04 LTS

which does work fine. So the steps I took are:

$ wget https://packages.erlang-solutions.com/erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install erlang

After them Erlang 24 was installed successfully on my ubuntu 16.04.

Then we will install the latest RabbitMQ. It is quite easy following packagecloud’s guide:

https://packagecloud.io/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/install

What I did is:

$ curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install rabbitmq-server

Then RabbitMQ 3.9 was installed successfully on the system (ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

Let’s check the software status:

$ sudo rabbitmqctl status
Status of node rabbit@AffectionateDarkmagenta-VM ...
Runtime

OS PID: 2729
OS: Linux
Uptime (seconds): 1945
Is under maintenance?: false
RabbitMQ version: 3.9.11
Node name: rabbit@AffectionateDarkmagenta-VM
Erlang configuration: Erlang/OTP 24 [erts-12.1.5] [source] [64-bit] [smp:1:1] [ds:1:1:10] [async-threads:1]
Erlang processes: 266 used, 1048576 limit
Scheduler run queue: 1
Cluster heartbeat timeout (net_ticktime): 60
......

As you see it’s Erlang/OTP 24 and RabbitMQ 3.9.11 running there. We have done the good job.